Professional Development

I could go in chronological order in this post, but that would require me to “bury the lead” and talk about Lawrence Lessig’s presentation in the middle of the post! Lessig is a rock star in my world and it seems only right that when writing about a copyright guru I “steal” his bio from his website!

“Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

For much of his career, Professor Lessig focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. He represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. His current academic work addresses a kind of “corruption.”

He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.”

Professor Lessig is the author of Remix (2008), Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He is on the board of the Creative Commons project, MAPLight, Free Press, Brave New Film Foundation, Change Congress, The American Academy, Berlin, Freedom House and iCommons.org. He is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation and LiveJournal. He has served on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He was also a columnist for Wired, Red Herring, and the Industry Standard.

Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.”

-from http://www.lessig.org/info/bio/

Lessig opened by discussing how in the past copyright had a tiny role at the turn of the century as the law was technical and difficult and only applied to a small group of businesses. Then things changed, and now copyright reaches across the spectrum, the law is more technical and difficult to understand, but applies to so many daily transactions. We collide with copyright constantly in our lives. It all changes because the platform we use to get access to our culture has changed. The current paradigm is that if we don’t secure this money for professional creators of content they will not be incented to create this content. But where is the role of the amateur (all those remixers on YouTube) in keeping culture alive?

Educators and scientist rather than questioning copyright have embraced it over the last 20 years without enough skepticism Lessig says we should all feel entitled to question the legal system (as lawyers do) rather than just roll over! Scholarly journal costs are blocking access to knowledge except for the richest Universities.

Necessary evils are still evil and should be avoided. It should not take years and over $500,000 to re-clear the rights to the “Eyes on the Prize” series. Documentaries suffer under current laws. Items will turn to dust before some items can be transferred and preserved

What to do about this? Well, Lessig thinks changing the law is hopeless. So he likes to change the norms with project like Creative Commons. He said we all need to be radical militant activists on this issue!

The Google Book Search Project was his next talking point. He has concerns the settlement is pushing us toward a radically complex model that pushes books toward the same issues faced by film (documentaries in particular!) He quoted Drucker that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

He wondered how to convey to lawyers that the current system is a failure that can’t work in the digital age? Copyright is essential, he is not a copyright abolitionist, he believes it needs reworking. He is a great speaker and if you ever get a chance to hear him, take it!

The e-books session was at capacity and also very engaging! Robin Schulze from Penn State discussed their program with the Sony Reader 505. (The new model, 700 series is more interactive, highlight underline, annotate) This reader has no backlight, long battery life, and is readable in daylight. Sony E ink is great for readability. Sony loaned the readers and the put them to use in English 30. Sony is a single use device on purpose to encourage immersive reading. Those running the study were struck by the reviews that commented on the coldness of the device. One described it as “The book John DeLorean would have designed.” The lack of interactivity and custom fonts made it hard to get everyone on the same page. It became obvious that everyone wanted consistent page numbers.

At the same time the students did not say it hindered their general comprehension. This discrepancy was hard for those conducting the pilot to reconcile! Students said the ebooks did not seem friendly or companionable. Need to change patterns of infant instruction in reading and need to include more interaction, Flash, and features that change/augment the reading experience! (Do what books can’t do now!)

Kindle was not interested in partnering with any of these schools!

Next I attend a Google Wave Demo. I’ve written and talked so much about Google Wave in the last few months and I still don’t have an account! Still, I can’t wait for an account for myself and accounts for all my friends and coworkers so we can start collaborating with this new tool! I do have some concerns that it will be a paradigm shift that will require some change in my processes!

The program “I’m Thin and Green” : Reducing the Desktop Carbon Footprint while Offering Anywhere, Anytime, Computing Services, was led by Richard Toeniskoetter of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff who described the school of 15,000 students on a mountain campus (between Sedona and the Grand Canyon) 7,000 additional students statewide (elevation 7000ft) as one that is epitomized by small class size.

They have a goal to be carbon neutral by 2020. They engage and educate the community both locally and globally and offer hands on sustainability learning opportunities to students. Both the Business and Engineering buildings are Gold LEED certified and the Applied Research and Design building is Platinum LEED certified.

Thin clients in use there use only 4 watts of power, with no need for UPCs as the data is all saved at data center. Hotdesking allows a session to follow you anywhere. Questions like offline usage (Network is down?) and licensing were important when considering this switch. Thin clients allow the applications in a lab to be changed at a moments notice, but do require the infrastructure to support this new model of computing. These clients are goof for about 80% of users, but not for those who heavily use multimedia. He said resistance to thin clients is natural and we should not force it where it does not fit. For those wanting more information he suggested reading an article by Karla Hignite in Business Officer, Oct 2009 on thin clients.

This post is getting too long, so I’ll end with the wild program “Bricks and Mortar Libraries in the 21^st Century: An Oxymoron? This was a Point and Counter Point session between Suzanne Thorin and Richard Luce. Thorin said the library as place is dead and we need to move on. She said new discovery tools and resources are all digital. ILL is a scanning activity, only buying books on demand of faculty; we are moving our books off-site. Students use us as social study space with their laptops, still quiet spaces, often not using our services on those laptops. She described roving librarians, saying we have abandoned the reference desk and that our organizational structures are “a blast from the past”. She said we need to stop counting numbers of books and other things that don’t show what we do. She also said we should count how we impact student success and retention and scholarly publishing instead.

Then Richard Luce spoke saying that she had been talking about print v digital, not about the library as place. He said we came here today (to Educause) to interact with one another. The library is a place to be with one another. There is a social, community, role, with libraries becoming classrooms and laboratories. Library is the neutral/mutual location on the college/university campus.

This was a wild session with too much point and counter point to capture, but you get the idea. I think it is interesting that ZSR has made many of the transitions discussed, creating quiet study areas, cool new collaborative spaces, and doing more with instruction.

Finally, some quick stats! There are about 4000 attendees at Educause this year, over 6000 if you count all the vendors, and there are over 1000 people participating in the online Educause conference. Oh, and I’m the only person from WFU here!

After spending the better part of a day traveling and with only 14% power left on my iPhone (I never like to get below 20%) and with only six minutes before the close of registration on Tuesday night, I checked in at the Educause 2009 registration station and collected my conference materials! For those of you who may not have heard of Educause, it is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. This year the conference is in Denver.

I’ve never been to Denver, and on the walk back to the hotel after registering, I discovered that since the blizzard last week things had warmed considerably and many other attendees were enjoying the weather and the 16^th Street pedestrian mall near the convention center. I was wiped out after a day of travel and hit the bed early to be ready for the general session early Wednesday.

Wednesday began bright and early thanks to crossing two time zones, and this gave me a chance to catch up on email, exercise and plan my session strategy. Diana Oblinger, the president and CEO of Educause opened the general session, reminding us that Educause is not just a conference, but a community. The planners of Educause 2009 asked for feedback and listened. There are more on managing the enterprise in a tough economy and more sessions on sustainability issues. The Point/Counterpoint sessions are back as are the Lightening Rounds sessions where multiple presenters offer new ideas at a fast pace. As many of you at ZSR know, there is an online conference option this year and a new feature, Educause Central Online, where you can connect with colleagues and chat with Educause staff in the online conference virtual meeting hub.

The keynote speaker was James C. Collins http://www.jimcollins.com/ Author of Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall. (We have them all in ZSR!) Collins spent much of his time discussing the five step-wise stages of decline he found in his research and outlined in How the Mighty Fall. He also focused what makes some good organizations become great. He states that “greatness is not a function of circumstance, but rather a matter of conscious choice and discipline”, and that “good” is the enemy of “great”. His research focuses on the business sector rather than the social sector, but he states that the results are applicable and the two are both necessary for a successful country. He has some interesting ideas about leaders and leadership, and his “Hedgehog Concept” is an interesting model to determine where you can be the best based on skills, resources and values. I plan to read some of his work, but it isn’t currently available for the kindle reader!

During my first pass through the exhibit hall I decided to shoot some video and post it on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/user/gizwomack#p/a/u/0/tXrOi1s6X20

The E-Portfolio Lightning Round was great! While it was familiar content it was good to see where various schools stand with E-Portfolios and to see that they are various uses. While some use them to show a student’s work to potential employers, many are only using E-Portfolios as an assessment tool. Some even used Google Sites to host the portfolios. Helen Barrett’s name always comes up when discussing E-Portfolios. She was described as the “mother of E-Portfolios” by one speaker. (Helen will be visiting WFU in the Spring.) Jeffrey Middlebrook from U of Southern California described their blog-based solution as a “blogfolio”. The University of Wisconsin is using the Desire2Learn E-Portfolio application. I also saw a demo of the open source portfolio add-on to Sakai.

In the Cloud Computing session “Cloud Computing and New Research Services: A Case Study”, The speaker. Beth Secrest, took a poll of the group before beginning, and there were only two librarians and many IT professionals present. Beth is the program officer for IT services for the Association of Research Libraries. She began with some definitions. “Cloud computing refers to the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters.” She then defined “campus cyberinfrastructure” as serving the underserved and average rather than extreme scholar. It is flexible, agile, scalable, and sustainable. Needs to be implemented fast or users will go find these sources on their own! She described using SAAS Service: FormSpring. In the past a class or a researcher would send database specifications to IT and wait for a response. This method is much more interactive. There are challenges and policies to create. Questions come up such as who owns the data, and who can create the form. Newer tools include backup options and more export tools. In their pilot there was only one interruption of service for only a few hours and the service reported not only the outage, but which users were affected by it. The pilot collaboration with Ithaca went very well! The reason for using FormSpring for the study was that ARL did not have the infrastructure internally to manage the technology of this research project. Beth stated that “Cheap and Simple” can often be “Good Enough” (This is exactly how I feel about Google Sites!)

More to come in tomorrow’s post!

Tom Conroy gave the first session of the second day on repairing tools. Tom is a book restorer and fine binder who spent 7 years in formal training under Anne and Theodore Kahle and also earned an MLIS from Berkeley. Tom currently teaches at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco. Tom spent several hours talking about removing rust from clamps with citric acid (what you call Sprite), repairing wobbly brushes, and re-seating gouges. He explained how various files are made and how to use them. He led an engaging conversation about scissors (who would’ve thought?) and sharpening them using a file. He also repaired several finishing presses as we watched.
I think almost everyone at ZSR has seen my board shear-the large deadly looking cutter with a wooden table as you enter Preservation. Tom insisted the best way to sharpen that tool was to cut a piece of thin brass sheet with it. I looked at the conservator sitting next to me and we both sort of said…what? Not everything in bookbinding is intuitive I guess.

The afternoon session was led by Dominic Riley on Cloth Rebacking. Cloth rebacking is creating a new spine piece for a book using cloth (as the name implies). Dominic was a delightful speaker and in my case-the best was saved for last. Dominic is a bookbinder and film-maker who spent 10 years studying in San Francisco and then moved back to his native England. He has won several top prizes from the Guild of Bookworkers equivalent in the UK-the Designer Bookbinders. He taught a session on creating an invisible repair to a cloth binding which was practical and engaging to all present. He seemed to know everyone by their first name and carried on a light-hearted repartee as he worked.
He lifted the cloth and split the boards to attach color-matched cloth and end-sheets to create-as he described it, an invisible repair. We were also treated to film trailers of two films Dominic has made-one called “Seventy Years in Bookbinding:Portrait of Bernard Middleton” . This film may be on the Preservation “wish list” soon.

All in all, this gathering of the Guild was engaging and has made me want to get more involved in this organization. I was able to meet many nice folks in this gentile crowd who offered information, encouragement and opportunities for the future.

I woke at 4:30 am, arrived at Greensboro PTI in time to see WXII send off the Flight of Honor, checked my bags, went through security and boarded the plane for Philadelphia. The plane left the terminal and the pilot abruptly announced we would be sitting there on the runway in Greensboro for an hour because of delays in Philadelphia. Great luck! But in the end, by some miracle, when I arrived in Philadelphia, I had just enough time to hit the restroom and walk briskly to check-in. I made it just in time for my flight to San Francisco!

The Guild of Bookworkers is an old organization going back to 1906. Every bookbinding “rock star” is a Guild member. The group is made up of conservators, binders, printers and book artists. Each year, the Guild has a conference with demonstrations by its’ members entitled: Standards of Excellence Seminar. To begin the conference, all the conference attendees were bused to the San Francisco Public Library for a reception and showing of the Guild’s exhibit of books entitled: “Marking Time”.

The first demonstration was by Tatiana Ginsberg. She gave a presentation called “The Tradition of Traditionally Dyed Japanese Papers. Tatiana studied at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and received a Fulbright Research grant to study traditional dyeing in Japan. She demonstrated the steps of brush dyeing using natural dyes which she cooked right in front of us.

The next demonstration was Carolee Campbell, owner of Ninja Press. Carolee has designed, printed and bound all the work from Ninja Press since 1984. She primarily designs books featuring contemporary poetry featuring unique bindings that she prints on her Vandercook letterpress. Carolee discussed her process of designing each book using examples she brought with her.

On Oct. 30, Leslie attended a webinar hosted by OCLC, detailing OCLC’s preparations for the soon-to-be-released new cataloging rules, RDA (Resource Description and Access), which will succeed AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules), the standard that has been in place for the last 30 or so years.

A poll of webinar attendees, posing the question “How is your institution responding to RDA?”, produced the following responses: 200+ are presently reading material and attending sessions on RDA; 85 are waiting to see how others proceed; 3 are currently changing their cataloging practices; and a small number do not plan to implement RDA.

An attendee asked: Will libraries be forced (by OCLC) to adopt RDA? The answer: No, we can continue to enter data in AACR2 for the forseeable future. The presenters noted that, while RDA has proven controversial in the United States, it has been received more positively in the UK and Australia — prompting OCLC to proceed early with RDA development, to meet the demand of its international clientele.

The planned release date of the RDA online manual is November of 2009 (http://www.rdaonline.org/). In the six months following the manual’s release, a project to test the new rules will be conducted by the three U.S. national libraries (LC, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agriculture Library). A group of test participants, representing libraries and archives of all types, as well as cataloging agencies (firms that provide cataloging for other institutions), will work with a core set of materials, representing all the major categories, plus other materials usual to the participating institutions, cataloging them in both AACR2 and RDA. Qualitative and quantitative feedback will be solicited, and the test results will be made public. OCLC presenters noted that, since the testers will be working in OCLC’s live production mode, we will see RDA records contributed to OCLC products such as WorldCat.

Catalogers will no doubt already be aware of the planned changes to the MARC21 record format, in preparation for RDA (http://www.loc.gov/marc/formatchanges-RDA.html). OCLC plans to make the new fields, codes, etc. available in Connexion (OCLC’s input interface for catalogers) before the testing period. Connexion users will be alerted in a future Technical Bulletin.

A webinar attendee asked if OCLC would be providing a new data-input template for RDA. While OCLC is currently working on an interface that incorporates RDA’s controlled vocabulary, the presenters noted that participants in the testing project would be working primarily with MARC21 records, and that “most of us will be working with MARC for some time to come.” They recommend that we follow the test reports, and wait for the results, before jumping in and implementing RDA.

A recording of the webinar will be posted on OCLC’s website (http://www.oclc.org/us/en/default.htm).

This evening I got in from the South Carolina Library Association conference. I spoke there for the College and University Section on “Adapting to a Changing World: Exceptional Services for a New Information Environment.” If you’re interested in the presentation, I posted it over on my blog.

I really enjoy seeing how different library associations work, as well as their conferences. SCLA is an annual conference that is in Columbia, SC every other year. In the years that it’s not in the capitol, it rotates from being on the eastern end of the state and the western end. The conference was a little smaller than NCLA, located in one hotel, but still had a lot of participants and vendors.

I was able to meet with two of the committee members (and Mary Horton!) for dinner the evening before the conference. It was fun to hear about USC (especially since two of my fellow RITS team members went there, and Mary now works there), and to learn a little about how SCLA works. As is often the case when several librarians get together, we found that we’re all facing similar issues.

Earlier in the day, Mary gave me a tour of her new library and part of the USC campus. The library looks fairly small and cozy from outside, but there are five acres of library below ground! There’s also a lovely reflecting pool outside the building.

Today, I spent the morning preparing for and giving the presentation. We were anticipating about 30 people, but one of the organizers said they stopped counting at 60 attendees. You know you have a topic that resonates with folks when they’re willing to sit on the floor!

Afterwards, Mary and I continued to catch up a bit, and then we went to a general session luncheon. Award winning Jonathan Green was the speaker, a South Carolinian artist. He was an entertaining speaker, but equally entertaining was the slideshow of his art that ran throughout his presentation. Beautiful work!

After that, I came on back to Winston-Salem to do a little cooking for tomorrow’s RITS retreat. I had a great time at SCLA; catching up with Mary, meeting nice people, having a receptive and big crowd for the presentation, and beautiful fall trees for the drive there and back all contributed to the lovely experience. Fun stuff!

On another note, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Library101 project. It was unveiled at Internet Librarian, and I did a little bit of writing for it. If you’re interested, I posted about it over on my blog.

Scott Adair, Ellen Daugman and I attended a webinar on Tuesday, Oct. 27th from Lyrasis. The title of the class was Planning for a Service Disruption and was taught by Dan Wilson, Associate Director of Access Services and Collection Development at UVA Medical Sciences Library. The key concept of this class was protecting core resources and continuity of core services. Dan likened our work in disaster preparedness to a lighthouse-and said we should think of ourselves as theoretical lighthouses who protect our resources just like a real lighthouse protects ships from running aground.
We completed three risk assessment exercises to try to determine what our key services were in varying emergencies, such as flooding, a power outage and a cyber-terrorism attack. We also spent some time discussing H1N1 and it’s affect on libraries. Few libraries in our group have been affected to any degree either in staffing or services by H1N1.
Dan had several ideas for operating remotely during an emergency including using Skype to deal with patrons. His library uses Skype for this purpose as a remote service desk. The other good idea he offered was establishing a partnership with a fellow library who would serve as your backup. UVA has this relationship with UNC-CH. The way it works is if UVA must shut down, they can use Illiad as a transparent interface for ILL services and UNC-CH can just pick up this service for UVA without patrons realizing it. I think this idea of a “Back up Library” is excellent and one ZSR might consider implementing. Locating a remote server is another idea Mr. Wilson discussed. With a remote server in place, web based services can be continued and this service is “always on”. UVA Medical Science Library has a pocket sized response plan for emergencies- whatever form they take. This plan can be carried easily by library staff and referred to during emergencies.
Our Disaster Committee is in the midst of developing such a plan for service continuity and this webinar was helpful in helping us to realize where we are and giving us ideas we can add to our existing strategy.

On Wednesday, Oct. 7^th, I attended the North Carolina Library Association Conference in Greenville. Keith Michaels Fiels, American Library Association Executive Director, was the keynote speaker at the Opening Session. I won’t rehash the details since Wanda has already summarized his presentation, but I agreed with his comment that “we need to assert our role in education because libraries are the other half of education system.” I also attended the Women’s Issues in Libraries Roundtable luncheon, which featured Linda Carlisle, N.C. Dept. of Cultural Resources Secretary, as speaker. The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources includes the State Library, the State Archives, Historic Sites, History Museums, the North Carolina Symphony, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She made a good point that “Libraries are important to the health and vitality of a community.” Also, Bryna Coonin from East Carolina University was a recipient of the Marilyn Miller Award for Professional Commitment of the Women’s Issues in Libraries Roundtable. I had served with Bryna Coonin on the Association of College & Research Libraries-Science & Technology Section (ACRL-STS) Research Committee, and it was great to see her win the award.

This forum was organized by Heritage Preservation to organize community groups to respond to disasters. First responders and cultural preservation groups from federal, state and local entities joined in the forum. This was the first such forum in North Carolina and focused on responders in the Triangle area. It was good to see fellow Preservation Librarians Andy Hart(UNC-CH) and Winston Atkins(Duke) before the event. During the morning break, I met with Alix Bentrud, Preservation Services Librarian for Lyrasis. She and I had corresponded about developing the ZSR Continuity of Operations Plan. We discussed our plan and what ZSR is trying to accomplish. Alix is mulling over the idea of a Lyrasis class on this topic, so I passed a copy of our template along to her. This was a good contact and discussion. Each presenter had only 15 minutes- so it was quick and dirty disaster preparedness all day.

Robert James, Executive Director of the NC Preservation Consortium led off welcoming everyone and thanking Heritage Preservation for their sponsorship. Larry Wheeler, Director of the NC Museum of Art also welcomed the crowd and talked about the new NC Museum of Art building (opening in April, 2010).
David Brook, Director, Division of Historical Resources, presented on “Why Protect Cultural Heritage?” He gave an overview of our cultural resources-their value and the threats to them.

Dr. Marty Matthews, Curator of Research, NC Historic Resources presented on “Triangle Cultural and Historical Treasures.” This was a quick summary of cultural resources in libraries, archives, museums, monuments, and State Historic sites in the Triangle.
Jane Long, VP of Emergency Programs, Heritage Preservation presented on ‘Risks and Response: How Emergency Systems Work.” The Alliance for Response initiative was formed to bring together cultural and emergency professionals before disasters occur. These meetings have been held in 9 cities since 2003. It consists of educational programs and training, and networks and policies are developed- (listservs, alert systems and contact systems).

Joshua Creighton, Dir. Wake Co. Emergency Mgt. and John McGrath, Chief Raleigh Fire Dept. presented on “How Emergency Systems Work.” Creighton spoke on threats- natural, technological and man-made; how you must evaluate your threats, and reduce risks to threats and overcome vulnerability. He said we must work with local responders. Chief McGrath spoke about the incident command system during a response to an emergency. He made the same point Creighton did: You have a place at the table during the emergency by interacting with the liaison officer. You should identify yourself to the scene commander, account for all personnel and mechanical operations. After the emergency, those with subject matter expertise must help establish salvage priorities. The Fire Dept. actually provides equipment-including breathing apparatus to allow trained staff into the structure for recovery.

April Cummings, Environmental Historic Team lead-FEMA presented on the federal response to a disaster. FEMA provides individual and public assistance and hazard mitigation after a disaster is declared. Assistance, insurance, disaster, housing assistance, and small business loans are provided. The National Historic Preservation Act takes into account the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. FEMA funding for historic sites- reviews the scope of the work, and determines eligibility prior to work beginning. Have a disaster place in place to minimize damage and coordinate response.

Martha Battle Jackson, Curator, NC Historic Sites, presented on” Disaster Team Roles.” She reviewed the ideas of Preparedness(ready at all times, prepare in advance, stockpiling equipment, practicing); Response (fac. Mgt, communication, security, data collection-photographing the recovery process, logging the images, etc. ) and Salvage (review functions, sorting, recording, packing, develop a tracking system).

Bill Gentry, Program Director, Community Preparedness and Disaster Management School of Public Health, UNC-CH presented on “Health and Safety following a Disaster.” He urged us to follow safety personnel after a disaster-do not assume the building is safe, use common sense. Hazards can be electrical, structural, mold, hydration for workers, air pollution/residue, mental health concerns and stress.

Elaine Wathen, Asst. Director, Information and Planning, NC Emergency Management presented on preparedness training. The NCEM provides training: exercises, elaborate discussions, or full scale role playing in a scenario.

Sarah Koonts, Head of Collection Management, NC State Archives presented on bringing people together to protect our vital records and archival treasures. Preparation before a disaster is key and helps during an actual disaster. Council of State Archivists took the lead role in planning how to protect vital records after Katrina and developed new methods and procedures. IPER-developed after Katrina, is web based training and support.

Darryl Aspey, NC Protective Security Agent, Department of Homeland Security presented on strengthening the infrastructure of the state against threats. Homeland Security has developed the National Infrastructure Protection Plan to detect threats, mitigate outcomes and recover. Their plans include protection plans for water, dams, monuments, state and federal facilities, etc. Protective Community Advisors advise local communities.

Carolyn Freitag, Emergency Management Assistance CompaCoordinator (EMAC) presented on mutual aid agreements in NC. All 100 counties have signed agreements supporting aid and assistance among local governments. EMAC is a national agreement developed after Hurricane Andrew. It facilitates efficient sharing of resources between member states during times of disaster or emergency. This is done with response teams.

David Goist, a professional conservator presented on model networks for cooperation and response. He introduced AIC Collections Emergency Response Team (CERT). This group advises on disasters.

Frank Thomson, Curator, Asheville Museum of Art and Andy Hart, Preservation Librarian, UNC-CH, discussed their networks: MACREN(Mountain Area Cultural Resources Emergency Network) and the Triangle Research Libraries Network Disaster Team. These networks respond to emergencies in their areas to recover cultural materials.

It was a day that covered so much, it was hard to absorb it all. The concept of a response team is a great one and I hope the Triangle area is successful in establishing a team.

LSAT Outreach Grant -Day 2- Digitization- Pilot Training

The session today concentrated on digitization. Giz and Audra taught the basics of digitization, along with lots of discussion with the group. Each group has unique materials and needs, so the questions help them sort out their individual questions.

Giz taught Image and Slide Scanning, and Digitizing Video
• Reasons for digitization- fragility, providing access to rare materials
• Equipment description, problems associated with digitizing video/audio-file size, resolution
• Scanning photos on the large bed scanner- resolution of images and what resolution to use for each application: web (100 dpi), print (300 dpi), etc. File formats: jpg, tiff, gif, etc.
• Scanning and saving images onto the computer and saving to external devices
• Scanning slides- file size, resolution, etc.
• Digitizing video- demonstrating EZ Video Converter and the digitization process, saving the file as an mp3
• Using Audacity to edit and digitize audio

Audra taught using Youtube to upload video, Flickr to upload images, and Scrbd for documents.

The group all appreciated the sessions and seemed optimistic about their future projects.